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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (12315)	9/4/1998 8:47:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

It looks like we have a global deflation, and our market is the last to feel the impact. I've read a bit on deflation in the past few years; some writers make the case that once a deflationary cycle has started it can't be stopped by the action of central banks. You simply have to ride out the cycle. The 'Austrian School' attributes deflation to the excessive credit expansion of the preceding boom cycle; the bigger the boom, the bigger the bust. We have had a rather big boom in equity prices, maybe we are going to see an equally impressive bust before things turn back up. The Great Depression was an especially bad deflation, but unless we have 30% of the money supply evaporate like we did then when the banks failed we shouldn't see anything quite that dramatic.

To: Gauguin who wrote (12315)	9/5/1998 6:27:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Gaugie, I'm reading Mary Cantwell's Speaking with Strangers, the third book in her autobiographical trilogy. A paragraph leaped out at me and made me think of you (and me-but I, of course,already knew the answer for me). Did you grow up in a small town? On summer nights they sat on their stoops, weaving tales out of the inconsequential, which are perhaps my favorite kind, because I can summon a profound interest in the possible reasons behind a favorite delivery boy's defection from one supermarket to another, or why the lights were on so late in So-and-So's apartment. It is the gift of growing up in a small town, I believe, this tendency to magnify the ordinary into the extraordinary. My little town had about 7000, many of whose families had lived there for generations, and except for the local universities, and an industry in a neighboring town, tended toward permanent residence and a complacent belief in the superiority of their lives over the rest of the world's. I know you also have this tendency to see small things as remarkable and even miraculous and it made me wonder about your past...was she right?